Forged In Blood - A Dragon Shifter Paranormal Romance of Power and War #989207

The alarm did not ring through Draven Keep.
No bell. No horn. No soldier woke.
It moved through blood beneath skin and bone
until it found the one man still bound to the deepest oath in the mountain.
Lord Aric Draven woke with his hand buried in the carved oak of his bed.
The Blood Forge Vault had been breached.

And whatever had entered it was not supposed to exist anymore.
Aric Draven rules Draven Keep with the cold precision of a man who has spent his life learning what his father's failures cost and building discipline into the spaces rage left behind. The dragon under his skin is not metaphor. It has teeth, wings, and the specific patience of something contained by choice rather than chain. When the Blood Forge Vault the oldest sealed chamber beneath the mountain, closed for a generation gives its alarm through blood rather than bell, he descends alone and finds a woman inside it who should not have been able to enter.

Selene is a thief. She is also, as the vault's blood-lock confirms before either of them can process what that means, the other half of the Forged Seal an ancient dual-bloodline structure that has been waiting inside the mountain for exactly the combination of Draven and human witness-blood standing inside the same chamber. She did not know this when she came for the relic inside the vault. She came for the money. She stayed because the seal activated and now carries both their marks, and because the relic she was paid to steal turns out to be the key to something old enough to destabilise not just Draven Keep but every uneasy peace between dragon houses and human settlements for a hundred miles.

The conspiracy beneath the dragon keep is not simple. The relic was not lost. It was hidden specifically, in the place most likely to require both bloodlines to access, by someone who understood that the dual-seal structure was the only thing that could prevent a dragon house from using the Forge's power unilaterally.
Now the people who hid it are dead. The people who want it are not.

For readers who want their dragon shifter romance built on genuine partnership rather than dominance, their thief heroines given intelligence equal to the danger they enter, their dragon lords stripped of the performance of power and made to work alongside someone who refuses to be impressed by it and their love stories forged in the specific heat of two people who chose the same hard future.

A paranormal romance. For adult readers. Contains themes of blood inheritance, institutional dragon-house politics, and the specific moral cost of old sealed power.